Get Smart insta-spinoff a new breed of film

Customarily, producers wait for box-office results before coming up with ideas for spinoffs of their movies. They gauge which characters or plot lines have captured imaginations and cry out for more exposure.

That spinoff paradigm was abandoned this week with the DVD release Get Smart's Bruce and Lloyd: Out of Control.

The story centers on two minor characters from Get Smart. Bruce and Lloyd (Masi Oka and Nate Torrence) are geeks who invent spy contraptions. It takes place in the same time frame as Get Smart. While Smart and 99 are in Moscow, Bruce and Lloyd are at CONTROL HQ, losing and then finding a gadget.

Warner Premiere isn't calling it a "spinoff," however. It's "parallel content." "A spinoff is more like the Norman Lear TV shows from the '70s ... where one character goes off and does something else," says Matt Bierman of Warner Premiere. "With parallel content, we can tell a story in the same timeline." But why did Warner assume there would be a demand for more of Bruce and Lloyd, with no input from the public? "It's a little bit of a risk," Bierman says, "but our feeling is ... these guys were endearing." Bierman acknowledged that marketing the DVD would be a challenge, with the narrow time frame. Until Get Smart came out, how could the studio promote a show about two guys nobody's heard of? He said publicity for the DVD is unusually heavy on in-store promotions, which go up after the film opens.

(With that in mind, the DVD's cover sticker offering a discount admission to see Get Smart seems kind of pointless. Who'd buy Bruce and Lloyd who hadn't already seen Get Smart?)

The "parallel content" experiment will happen again, Bierman says, with next year's Zach Snyder film Watchman. And if these DVD releases make money, expect other production companies to do it, too.